Barry Baker

Loves journalism, is not a journalist. Loves politics, is not a politician. Loves the media, is not a medium. Barry is committed to helping the world become a more interesting place with Power of Opinion.

September 2007

September 24, 2007

This evening I'm on the road. I travel fairly frequently for business, this week to Winnipeg. I've done a little sight-seeing on previous visits, snapped some pictures, but this time I'm well west of the downtown core, out near the home of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Canad Inns Stadium.

I try hard to fit in some local experience wherever I go, but between flights and meetings often that local experience translates into little more than the food and drink that can be found within walking distance of the hotel. This evening however, with a strong recommendation and a little help from the shuttle driver, I've oddly enough arrived at the Winnipeg Hooters for tonight's Monday Night Football game between the Saints and the Titans.

After a brief battle with the waitress over the concept of local vs. domestic beers, she scrounges up a scarred bottle of Two Rivers Red lager by the Fort Garry Brewing Company. Although the first bottle goes down well, it is quite frankly a little sweet for my taste and so the second bottle sits largely unfinished on the table while the waitresses - who I am surprised to discover provide very fast service - sling beers and pose for photos with the football-mad crowd.

I'm a little out of place sitting by myself reading back issues of the Winnipeg Free Press and scrawling notes between columns, but am intrigued to read about a local entrepreneur who was recently run out of the downtown by Winnipeg city council.

Council sunk Kyriakos Vogiatzakis's application to moor the River Rouger - his riverboat - at the Donald Street dock. Downtown residents concerned about party noise and parking successfully lobbied council, so now the entrepreneur is left nursing his wounds. "That's the problem with this city. Nothing moves here. It's very conservative, and that's why all the young people move to other provinces," Mr. Vogiatzakis complained to the Winnipeg Free Press.

Nicholas Hirst's subsequent column in the same paper, Unplan for a vibrant downtown, argues that the city needs to find a way to energize the downtown, not via a grand plan or politicians bending backwards over NIMBY special interests, but rather by allowing business initiatives to occur rather than stifling them.

His column brings to mind our own troubles with the concept of a downtown waterfront hotel in Kamloops. The concept spurred the organization of the Save Public Waterfront group, and provided an opportunity then and since for some local politicians to come down firmly on both sides of the issue.

To be clear, there is no comparison between downtown Winnipeg's urban decay and the situation in Kamloops, but the underlying problem may be similar: lack of investment and growth.

Retail and residential investment has largely bypassed the foot-friendly core of our fair city for much of the 25 years since Aberdeen Mall opened and residential development followed it up the hill. The experience was similar on the North Shore when the Halston Bridge opened around the same time; the new route expedited traffic and consumers away from traditional North Shore retail centers on Fortune and Tranquille. One major retailer after another (Eatons, Woodwards, The Bay, Zellers, Sears, Overwaitea, etc.) abandoned both the downtown and the North Shore, leaving both areas sucking wind while the southwest sector stretched its legs.

As much as things have improved since then, opinions differ on whether the Kamloops downtown core is now "vibrant". I can't count the number of times I've heard residents and visitors alike complain that there is nothing open downtown on Sundays, for example. Some seem to think this is the fault of retailers, as though they had some kind of civic obligation to remain open when there isn't any business. Retailers will keep their doors open when there is sufficient demand, but when there isn't, they don't.

While Winnipeg council has nixed proposals that could well have breathed some energy into the downtown core, our civic leaders have so far resisted pressure to rezone the parking lot behind Interior Savings Centre as parkland, and have so left the door open to development there in the future. Zoning and taxation are the two primary tools with which municipalities can directly encourage new investment, and on the latter count the City also implemented a Revitalization Tax Exemption to encourage investment in the downtown core. But while the general concept of development can be attractive, civic politicians often tie themselves into knots over specific initiatives.

It must be very tempting to meddle in every little thing; recently some councilors have made heavy-handed comments about smoking bylaws for restaurant patios. While I appreciate their enthusiasm, business is more apt to thrive when it has the opportunity to innovate and differentiate, rather than conform. If council is serious about growing an energetic and thriving downtown core it will need to resist the urge to pull out the whistle, at least until the game actually gets underway.

Back at Hooters as I finish this post, it looks like the New Orleans Saints will need more than a friendly ref if they expect to come out on top; at some point, the players need to show up.

To share your thoughts with Right Up Your Alley: Kamloops readers, click on "Comments" (below).

September 08, 2007

The Kelowna Chamber of Commerce is a persistent organization. Over the years it has been at the front of various initiatives with respect to the Coquihalla Highway, the most recent of which occurred in May at the BC Chamber's Annual General Meeting (AGM). At the Victoria AGM, the Kelowna Chamber proposed a resolution calling for the provincial government to periodically reduce the toll charges over the next couple of years, and eliminate the toll altogether by the beginning of 2010.

The Kelowna Chamber was unsuccessful in generating the support necessary for the resolution to succeed (55% of the delegates supported the resolution, while a 2/3 majority was required); rather, delegates passed a separate resolution (opposed by the Kelowna Chamber) asking the provincial government to allocate revenue from the province's only toll highway towards new highway development and maintenance (in essence, let's keep the toll).

Then in July, the last 4-lane section of the highway between Garcia and Courtney lakes was completed just east of Merritt (Minister Falcon at the announcement, right). The completion of this final leg of the highway effectively killed efforts by many within the Okanagan to convince the government to instead build the Kingsvale Connector. The connector would considerably shorten the drive time between Kelowna and Vancouver, but would also bypass Merritt and potentially impact traffic density north to Kamloops. The issue has long been a source of discontent throughout the Okanagan.

On Friday however Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon threw Kelowna and the rest of the Interior a bone when he spoke at a luncheon hosted by the Chamber, which according to the Kelowna Daily Courier (Free ride on Coquihalla unlikely before 2012) was attended by "hundreds of people". Much to the delight of those in attendance, the Minister put the issue of the toll back on the table by speculating that when the cost of construction is fully paid, "we can have a discussion then about the tolls – whether they should be continued, reduced or eliminated.”

Figures published by the Courier indicate that the cost of the Coquihalla was $955 million; to date $700 million in tolls have
been collected, and with $50 million in annual revenues the cost of the highway should be paid off by 2012.

Addressing the subject of the toll provides the Liberals with an excellent opportunity to engage the Interior at the half-way mark of its mandate. The Liberals are sitting on a booming economy and a $3 billion surplus, which will allow them to put the toll back into play as they should.

Such a move would be a political winner. It would help win over many of the voters in "the Heartland" who were unimpressed with the Liberals' attempts in their first mandate to privatize the highway, and remain equally unimpressed with massive Olympic spending that hasn't generated many local benefits outside the lower mainland.

While this story only received two inches of print in today's Kamloops Daily News, it should garner a lot more attention over the next couple of years. Expect the government to trickle-feed us with updates as they allow popular support to "convince" them to remove the toll. This will allow them to dominate Interior front page news at their leisure, while concurrently keeping the NDP off-message (not that they seem to need much help). In the end the toll will be gone and here in Kamloops we'll get exactly what we want, as will the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce, and of course, the Liberals.

To share your thoughts with Right Up Your Alley: Kamloops readers, click on "Comments" (below).

The end result of the 1996 campaign was that the NDP won the election with 39 of 75 seats, but with only 39.45% of the popular vote. Gordon Campbell's Liberals earned 37,534 more votes for 41.82% of the popular vote, but claimed just 33 seats. The Reform and Progressive Democratic parties collectively polled more than 15% of the popular vote, but claimed just 3 seats between them. Mr. Campbell's loss despite his superior showing in the popular vote has since motivated him to explore alternate electoral systems such as the Single Transferable Vote system proposed by the Citizen's Assembly on Electoral Reform, which BC voted down in the 2005 referendum.

A review of individual riding results for the 1996 election indicates that if the three sibling centre-right parties had managed to ally themselves in some way (via a coalition or other means) prior to the election rather than splitting the vote, the NDP tally could have been reduced by as many as 20 of their 39 seats, and the Casino Gate never would have seen the light of day.

Likewise, a review of individual riding results for the 2001 provincial election indicate that had voters not split their ballots between the NDP and Green Party, the left would have won an additional 7 seats, qualified for the benefits associated with official party status, and presented a much more effective opposition to the Liberal majority. The impact of a coalition on the left would have been much more profound however in the 2005 election, when the Green and NDP votes combined would have won an additional 11 seats to take the prize and deny the Liberals a second mandate.

I respectfully disagree with the notion that our electoral systems needs fixing. Voters in the two Kamloops ridings were the only voters in the province to deny even a simple majority to the STV question (the referendum required 60% of the popular vote throughout the province, and a simple majority in 60% of the ridings), and we got it right.

Our electoral system is not broken, and neither is the party system. What sometimes gets broken however, is the parties themselves.

Case in point the Progressive Conservatives, which in 1993 lost all but two of their 151 seats in the House of Commons. The Bloc Québécois formed the official opposition with just 13.52% of the popular vote, while the Progressive Conservatives and Reform parties polled with 18.69% and 13.52% of the popular vote, respectively. The right took a well-deserved beating in that election, but developed such a taste for its own blood in the process that it didn't manage to put a winning formula together for another 13 years.

The solution to the right's demise was its willingness to embrace renewal while accepting a spectra of opinions within the coalition.

Now let's look at the left; the NDP has been flanked by the growth of the Green Party in both federal and provincial elections, much like the Green Party and Ralph Nader have disrupted Democratic election results in the United States. Buzz Hargrove of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) saw the writing on the wall in the run-up to the 2006 federal election, and bucked years of tradition by backing then-Prime Minister Paul Martin and the Liberal party rather than his brothers and sisters in the NDP. It didn't work, but he had the right idea.

In 1990, Robert J. Jackson and Doreen Jackson published the 2nd edition of Politics in Canada (Prentice-Hall Canada Ltd.), in which they wrote:

Electoral systems do not determine the nature of party systems, nor the type of government, majority or minority, single-party or coalition, in any country. Governmental outcomes are largely a function of the balance of party forces: the party system, in turn, is largely shaped by a country's political culture and social structure and by the electoral behaviour of its citizens.

Canada doesn't need a new electoral system, and neither does British Columbia. Why
legislate, when the power to build winning coalitions already lays
within the hands of the members and leaders of our political parties?
The problem is that the parties on the left apparently still haven't
experienced enough pain to resolve the problem on their own, hence the
cry for an electoral system that will allow them to avoid the hard work
of building bridges instead of silos.

To share your thoughts with Right Up Your Alley: Kamloops readers, click on "Comments" (below).